Grabbing strings with awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello everyone,
I am doing some sort of analysis for some data about organic solvents, and I have a problem with writing a command to do this:

Here's a sample of my file:

 
1     ethanol
2     methanol
3     methanol/ethanol
4     ethanol/methanol
5     ethanol/DMF
6     ethyl ether/methanol
7     ethanol methanol
8     methanol ethanol
9     ethanol-Methanol
10   methanol-Ethanol
11   methanol-DMF
12   ethyl ether/Methanol
13   DMF
14   chloroform

This is a tab separated file, I am trying to generate a new file that contains combinations of ethanol and anything else using "awk".
also, I am trying to generate another file that contains exactly the other way around, everything but ethanol.

Please note that the word "Methanol" contains "ethanol" inside it as a string.
Also, the separation is not regular, sometimes a slash and sometimes a space.
Do you know what command i should use to get over this problem?

I am currently using this command :

 
awk 'BEGIN{IGNORECASE=1} $2 ~ /ethanol/' filepath

but this is giving me methanol as well. I am looking for combinations containing ethanol in one file, and everything else in another file.

Cheers,

2

Try:

grep -i '[/ \t-]ethanol' infile

grep -i '[[:blank:]/-]ethanol' infile
3

Try:

perl -ne 'print if /\bethanol\b/i' file
4

Now, this solution does eliminate the / characters...

$ cat sample40.txt
1     ethanol
2     methanol
3     methanol/ethanol
4     ethanol/methanol
5     ethanol/DMF
6     ethyl ether/methanol
7     ethanol methanol
8     methanol ethanol
9     ethanol-Methanol
10   methanol-Ethanol
11   methanol-DMF
12   ethyl ether/Methanol
13   DMF
14   chloroform

$ tr "/" "\t" <sample40.txt | awk 'BEGIN{IGNORECASE=1} ($2 ~/ethanol/ && $2 !~/methanol/) || ($3 ~/ethanol/ && $3 !~/methanol/)'
1     ethanol
3     methanol  ethanol
4     ethanol   methanol
5     ethanol   DMF
7     ethanol methanol
8     methanol ethanol
5

try also:

awk 'BEGIN{IGNORECASE=1} $2 ~ /^ethanol/' filepath
6

Thanks for the command dude. I honestly don't understand what it means but, it worked out for me! ( i mean the first part [[ tr"/" "\t" ]])
It would be very kind if you tell me what you did up there!

Thank you!

7

tr "/" "\t" translates all the forward slash / to horizontal tab \t

For further reference on tr command check the manual here